In the following essay, Gerstenberger views “The Open Boat” as “a story with an emphasis on the epistemological aspect of the existential crisis.”

Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” is generally acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of the modern short story. The question of the story's excellence has never been debated; the only questions have been the proper means of defining the story's modernity and of accounting for what appear to be certain awkwardnesses of style, tone, and point of view.

“The Open Boat” has been hailed as an example of naturalistic fiction at its best until recent years, when the automatic and somewhat naive tendency to equate naturalism and...